Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century, Page 3

  Malone, for one, saw this as a fundamental change in Indian foreign policy making: ‘Indian foreign policy in the twenty-first century is characterized by a marked shift towards pragmatism and a willingness to do business with all,’ he observed, ‘resembling in none of its important specifics that of Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s, and even less that of her father in the 1950s and 1960s.’

  Yet it is not merely a self-centred, economic-determinist approach to the world that dominates Indian thinking. Nehru’s old globalist orientation is still hard-wired into the consciousness of policy-makers. The main difference is that the post-colonial chip has fallen off our shoulder; New Delhi can now afford to look at the globe from a position of authority. Today we can take our sovereignty for granted; we know no one would dare threaten it. Our strategic autonomy is a fact of life and no longer something that has to be fought for. We are now in a position to graduate from a focus on our own sovereign autonomy to exercising a vision of responsibility on the world stage, from a post-colonial concern with self-protection to a new role participating in the making of global rules and even playing a role in imposing them.

  India has a self-evident interest in helping to create an enabling international environment for our own national objectives. International trade has an increasingly direct bearing on our national well-being; over 30 per cent of our GDP is now accounted for by our imports and exports, and our growth and prosperity depend on continued imports of fertilizer, energy, metals and capital, as well as continued receptivity to Indian migrants (in 2010 India was the second largest emigrant nation of the world with 11.4 million migrants and the top remittance receiving nation in the world with $55 billion in inward remittances). It obviously serves our national purposes to expend our energies and resources in working to ensure a peaceful and equitable global order, to preserve the freedom of the seas and open sea lanes of communication, to explore outer space and cyberspace in ways that help all of humanity—all the ‘global public goods’ that international theorists theorize about, but which have a tangible impact on our everyday lives.

  One tangible example of India’s new-found willingness to engage the outside world—specifically, the foreign private sector—in our domestic development lies in the way we have developed our telecommunications sector, perhaps the single most remarkable example of India’s recent transformation through liberalization. Foreign companies, technology and expertise helped build India’s initial wireless networks between 1995 and 2002. The initial networks were built by Indian companies in joint ventures with global multinational corporations such as BT, AT&T, Telstra, US West, Swiss PTT and Bell Canada; a large part of the technology was sourced from the European firms Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson, while US companies like Cisco, HP and IBM remain prominent providers of the telecom technology which powers India’s networks. Realizing that the interests of India’s citizens in large-scale and widespread availability of telecommunications needed an international approach, the government has encouraged foreign technology, and the size of the Indian market has helped lower costs both for handsets and infrastructure, with some of the lowest tariffs for mobile services anywhere in the world. The result is that today we have nearly 900 million SIM cards in circulation and are poised to overtake China in 2012 to become the world’s largest telecom market—something that the old, protected and inward-focused Indian telecom system could never have aspired to. International engagement has empowered the ordinary Indian and changed his daily life.

  Internationalism, as Nehru demonstrated in his speech at that first moment of independence, has always been a vital part of our national DNA. It was also typical of Nehru’s internationalist vision that his words, uttered sixty-four years ago, were not only profoundly right, but could be spoken today without the change of a comma. And yet we pursue our internationalism today in a world where all the unifying forces of interdependence—satellite communications, easy jet travel, the Internet, the ability to move capital with the click of a mouse in an increasingly globalized world—are challenged by the destructive forces of division that are equally global. The terrorists of 26/11 used the instruments of globalization and convergence—the ease of communication, GPS and mobile telephone technology, five-star hotels frequented by the transnational business elite, and so on—as instruments for their fanatical agenda. Similarly, on 9/11 in New York, rather than as forces to bring the world closer together, the terrorists also used similar tools—crashing the jet aircraft into those towers emblematic of global capitalism, while the doomed victims of the planes made frantic mobile phone calls to their loved ones.

  In other words, the very forces that, through globalization, are pulling us together seem at the same time, through international terrorism, to be driving us apart. The terrible notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’ has entered our discourse, as the often benign forces of religion, culture and society have become causes of conflict, rather than of succour, in many places.

  Both 9/11 and 26/11 were grotesque reflections of this paradoxical phenomenon of convergence and disruption, unity and division, in today’s world. For an India striding confidently into the twenty-first century, it is not enough to navigate our way cautiously between these forces. We must work to build a world which accentuates convergence and prevents the forces of disruption from succeeding. This is in our national interest; it is also an essential aspect of the responsibility we must exercise if we are to live up to being worthy of the kind of nation we are becoming.

  India has been directly affected by both global trends, of convergence and disruption. On the one hand, we are a far more globalized economy than most, and more so than we ever were in the days when we raised the protectionist barriers to shield us while we developed our autonomous national capabilities. We are today more connected through trade and travel—much more than ever before—with the international system, and trade and foreign investment account for a steadily increasing share of our GDP. Indian firms have become multinationals, investing abroad to a level that in some recent years has exceeded the FDI coming into India. Indians work everywhere, and have acquired a reputation for mathematical, computing and engineering skills that are prized by international employers. Foreign companies are hiring Indians in India to do research and development for their globally branded products; GE and Phillips, for instance, employ more researchers in India than in their worldwide headquarters. Our relationship with each of the major powers has grown rapidly, and China is now our single largest trading partner. India’s soft power stretches across the globe, with our popular cinema in the vanguard, influencing the hearts and minds of foreigners almost everywhere. Our political relationships have also been strengthened. With the United States, it was possible for us to undertake the civil nuclear initiative, removing the limitations that had been placed on us after the 1974 and 1998 nuclear tests. Today we can admit—indeed, we can boast—that our links with the world are one reason for the highest-ever growth rates that we enjoyed between 2003 and 2008.

  But the external situation has been changing considerably. Politically, the world is entering a period of transition from dominance by a single power to a more balanced distribution of power in the international system, though this still falls short of true multi-polarity. India had barely adjusted to the reality of a unipolar world when the United States’ seemingly unchallengeable dominance of the world order began to fade in the first decade of the twenty-first century. New powers are rising, new alliances are forming, and we are witnessing the rise of a new global power in China, the only visible contender for the superpower status now enjoyed singularly by the United States. Challenges in India’s immediate neighbourhood, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, have made us conscious that our development is vulnerable to the impact of forces and events beyond our borders.

  As the world transitions to something closer to real multi-polarity, we should realize that the existing power holders can hardly be expec
ted to easily cede power to others. Even if academic seminarians take the notion of new ‘rising powers’ for granted, no formerly risen power is prepared to fall. Many will seek to stay in place, even if it means continuing the existing inequities in the international order. In some cases new and old powers are busy cultivating the very states whose influence they are simultaneously trying to check. In turn, this will mean an opportunity for other countries to build new coalitions with each other in their efforts to find a better place in the sun. This could lead to clashes, unless the entire international architecture is reshaped cooperatively—an objective India can, and should, work towards, and to which we shall return later in this volume.

  India today disposes of far greater leverage in its extended neighbourhood than before, but arguably bears greater responsibility as well. Our impact on regional issues such as peace and security prospects in South Asia, or even on issues broader afield such as Southeast and East Asian economic integration, is already considerable and will grow in ways that could not have been imagined two decades ago. Our role is also of determining importance on such global issues as the management of climate change, the provision of energy security and the global macroeconomic discussions in the G20 about coordinating ways to pull the world out of recession.

  The world economic crisis, which started as a financial crisis at the heart of the Western capitalist system, has not yet ended. Fortunately, while India has been affected, it has been one of the few economies that continue to show growth, attaining 6.9 per cent in the 2011–12 fiscal year. Nor is it clear that the world economy will return to an expansionary phase any time soon. Our search for markets, technology and resources to fuel our growth will be more complicated than it has been in the recent past. International developments will inevitably affect us. Inflation, for instance, a hot-button political issue in India, is only very partially the result of policies pursued by the elected Indian government. Among the significant causes of rising prices in India is the massive injection of liquidity by the developed Western countries into the world economy to promote their own recovery from the global economic crisis. This has been magnified by a rise in oil and commodity prices, itself partly caused by the availability of more capital but also compounded by the uncertain political climate in a Middle East torn by ‘jasmine revolutions’ and mounting civil strife. To suggest that domestic economics can be pursued without reference to foreign policy is no longer a serious proposition.

  So while India’s strategic goals must remain the same—to enable the domestic transformation of India by accelerating our growth, preserving our strategic autonomy, protecting our people and responsibly helping shape the world—achieving these goals in the present economic climate will be a challenge to our skill and ingenuity. As protectionism grows and closes markets, and as credit is sucked back into developed economies for their own stimulus and recovery, we will have to rely much more on growing our own domestic market. The world of today is not going to provide as propitious an environment for India’s growth and prosperity as the world of two decades ago did, when we first liberalized. This brings me right back to the underlying theme of this book: the importance of using our international policies to serve our fundamental objective of pulling poor people in India out of poverty and into the twenty-first-century globalized economic system.

  What shape should our foreign policy take to enable us to cope with such a world? Decades ago, the scholar Richard A. Falk summarized six broad criteria for evaluating foreign policy in a democracy, which seem broadly relevant to our challenge even today. A country’s foreign policy should, first of all, be a desirable one—approved means (means approved by the general public) must be used in pursuit of approved ends (goals approved by national institutions like Parliament), with the bases of approval made explicitly. It should be effective—those approved means should be successful in accomplishing the ends sought. It should be popular, since in a democracy it is important that an elected government’s foreign policy positions enjoy high levels of public support. It should be legitimate—both the means and the ends of foreign policy should be in accord with the Constitution, and with India’s solemn international obligations and treaty commitments, including respecting the constraints embodied in international law. Falk’s final two criteria are perhaps both idealistic and contestable: he suggests that foreign policy should be populist (the means and ends of foreign policy should reflect public participation, with influence on policy-making filtering upwards to the decision-makers as well as downwards from them) and equitable (the domestic costs, burdens and sacrifices resulting from a country’s foreign policy should be distributed fairly within society).

  India’s foreign policy has arguably done a good job in reflecting most of these criteria, though it is clear that we still have a way to go before we can express satisfaction with our performance on all counts. But Falk’s list is worth bearing in mind as a yardstick when we examine India’s international standing in the rest of this volume.

  So what does all this mean for the reshaped world that we hope will emerge in the next couple of decades? What can we project for the world of the next twenty years?

  I have little doubt that the international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2030 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a transformed global economy, a real transfer of relative wealth and economic power from the West, or the North, to other countries in the global South, and the growing influence of non-state actors, including terrorists, multinational corporations and criminal networks. In the next two decades, this new international system will be coping with the issues of ageing populations in the developed world; increasing energy, food and water constraints; and worries about climate change and migration. India’s transformation will mean that resource issues—including energy, food and water, on all of which demand is projected to outstrip easily available supplies over the next decade or so—will gain prominence on the international agenda.

  We must be determined to pursue our domestic transformation, and to do so responsibly. The energy demands this process will make on the world will be huge, and we must seek to fulfil our energy requirements through a mix of efficient and environmentally friendly means (hydro, solar, wind and nuclear, in addition to the still-unavoidable thermal-and petroleum-or gas-driven forms of energy). Our foreign policy must serve this objective too: the India–US nuclear agreement was a step in this direction. So too will be an Indian policy on climate change that respects the world’s anxieties about global warming while preserving the capacity to do what it takes to connect the deprived and excluded among our people to the opportunities the twenty-first century offers. The global environment, in both senses of that phrase, could undermine many of the aspirations of Indian foreign policy.

  Our demand for food will inevitably rise as well, perhaps by 50 per cent in the next two decades, as a result of our growing population, their rising affluence and the improved dietary possibilities available to a larger middle class. We will need to multiply our sources of food, including developing agricultural land abroad, in Africa and even Latin America. Lack of access to stable supplies of water, particularly for agricultural purposes, is reaching critical proportions and the problem will worsen because of rapid urbanization over the next twenty years. We will need skilful and creative diplomacy to ensure that interruptions in the flow of water across our borders do not bedevil relations with our neighbours.

  All this underscores my initial point, that foreign policy is basically about fulfilling domestic objectives. Let us never forget that if we succeed—when we succeed—in our national transformation, we will be including more and more of our people in the great narrative of hope that has been the narrative of social and economic development in the West over the last two hundred years. We will be connecting 500 million Indians to their own country and to the rest of the world. Half a billion Indian villagers will join the global village. That is an exciting prospect and I am
sure, for some, an alarming one.

  This underscores the need for increased, more democratic and more equitable global governance. Let us look even further than the next two decades. Growth projections for Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries) indicate they will collectively match the original G7’s share of global GDP by 2040–50. All four probably, and certainly India, will continue to enjoy relatively rapid economic growth and will strive for a multipolar world in which their capitals are among the poles. New Delhi is already a magnet for visiting potentates and tributaries; it will certainly be among the half-dozen places from which the twenty-first century world will be run.

  The experts tell us that historically, emerging multipolar systems have been more unstable than bipolar or unipolar ones. The rise of China is one of the great and visible events of our geopolitics, and it appears to be matched by a comparable decline in the political will and economic self-confidence of the Western powers, at a time when several ‘emerging’ nations are acquiring strength and confidence on the global stage. In a world in which some great powers are no longer quite as great as some formerly minor states, and where a powerful China is scrutinized carefully for signs of incipient hegemonic tendencies, there are serious questions about the future of the world order. Might China seek to challenge the existing global system, as a rising Germany did at the beginning of the twentieth century, or to reorder the structures of international organization, as a triumphant United States did after the Second World War? Should a country like India work actively in these circumstances to reform and strengthen the world order in order to create a pattern of several powerful states cooperating with each other in an inclusive multipolar world system?